Mdmail sends emails written in Markdown. It could be used as a standalone command-line script or as a python module. The features includes

• Have a sane default CSS style and support CSS customization
• Support local images as inline images

Screenshot of an email sent via mdmail viewed in Google Inbox

To install mdmail

$ pip install mdmail

When sending emails from command-line, the body of the email could be read from a file or stdin.

Email headers such as subject, from/to, cc etc could be specified at the beginning of the markdown file, Or be specified in command-line arguments.

Here is an example of Markdown file with email headers

Subject: Sample Email
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]

# Sample Email

-

![Embed local image](../assets/image.jpg)

To send this email with mdmail

$ mdmail sample_email.md

Here is an example of specifying subject, from/to in command-line

$ mdmail [email protected] [email protected] --subject='Sample' sample_email.md

To read email content from stdin,

$ echo '# Sample Email' | mdmail [email protected] [email protected] --subject='Sample'

SMTP server configurations are read from the following environment variables

export MDMAIL_HOST="" # default: localhost
export MDMAIL_PORT="" # default: 25
export MDMAIL_USE_TLS="" # default: false
export MDMAIL_USE_SSL="" # default: false
export MDMAIL_USERNAME="" # default: None
export MDMAIL_PASSWORD="" # default: None
export MDMAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER="" # default: None

Full help of mdmail command-line script

usage: mdmail [-h] [--subject SUBJECT] [--from FROM_] [--to TO] [--cc CC]
              [--bcc BCC] [--reply-to REPLY_TO] [--css CSS] [--print-only]
              [file]

Send email written in Markdown.

positional arguments:
  file                  Markdown file for email content. Default to STDIN.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --subject SUBJECT, -s SUBJECT
                        Subject line
  --from FROM, -f FROM
                        From address
  --to TO, -t TO        To addresses, separated by comma
  --cc CC, -c CC        CC address, separated by comma
  --bcc BCC, -b BCC     Bcc address, separated by comma
  --reply-to REPLY_TO, -r REPLY_TO
                        Reply-to address
  --css CSS             Use a custom CSS file
  --print-only, -p      Only print out rendered html

Sending emails in python is straight-forward.

import mdmail

email="""
# Sample Email

- Python is awesome
- Markdown is cool

![Embed local image](../assets/image.jpg)
"""

mdmail.send(email, subject='Sample Email',
            from_email='[email protected]', to_email='[email protected]')

By default, it will use SMTP server on localhost. You could specify a SMTP server as well.

# Specify SMTP server
smtp = {
  'host: 'my-mailserver.com',
  'port': 25,
  'tls': False,
  'ssl': False,
  'user: '',
  'password': '',
}

mdmail.send(content, subject='Sample Email',
            from_email='[email protected]', to_email='[email protected]',
            smtp=smtp)

• email (str/obj): A markdown string or EmailContent object
• subject (str): subject line
• from_email (str): sender email address
• to_email (str/list): recipient email addresses
• cc (str/list): CC email addresses (string or a list)
• bcc (str/list): BCC email addresses (string or a list)
• reply_to (str): Reply-to email address
• smtp (dict): SMTP configuration with following keys
  • host (str): SMTP server host. Default: localhost
  • port (int): SMTP server port. Default: 25
  • tls (bool): Use TLS. Default: False
  • ssl (bool): Use SSL. Default: False
  • user (bool): SMTP login user. Default empty
  • password (bool): SMTP login password. Default empty

Since mdmail can read from stdin and support email headers such as subject/from/to in the markdown file itself, integrating mdmail with Vim, Emacs or other text editors is easy.

To use mdmail in Vim, just write a markdown email with headers, and then execute w !mdmail command, which will send current buffer as stdin to mdmail.

In Emacs, you could write a small function to do the same thing

(defun mdmail-send-buffer ()
  (interactive)
  (shell-command-on-region (point-min) (point-max) "mdmail"))

Then M-x mdmail-send-buffer will send current buffer to mdmail.